Introduction

I was in need of exporting multiple tables in a DataSet to an Excel file with multiple sheets, and I couldn't find anything that actually works. So, I wrote one to help people who might be in the same situation. The complete code in ExcelHelper.cs is shown below.

This only works for Excel 2003 and later versions. If a table in the dataset has more than 65,000 rows, it will break it into multiple sheets for the table with sheet name (tableNameX). replaceXmlChar() function is added to escape XML reserved characters.

Limitations of the Code

It does not handle data tables with more than 256 columns (Excel 2003 column limit), and when data tables have very large rows count, it might throw OutOfMemory exception.

Using the Code

To export a DataSet, just call the ExcelHelper.ToExcel() function as follows: